The new look to vee8

Hi everyone. As I’ve said before, I wanted to redesign vee8 to better fit the direction it is going in. Today I’ve launched the new look. Just thought I’d write a post explaining what’s what. Before I start, you might have gathered that it is not totally finished yet. But I thought it would be better to unleash it and see what feedback I got so that I could incorporate suggestions into the tweaks I make over the coming days.

I thought this would be a quick redesign. As you can see, the look and feel is much the same as it was before. But what I thought would be quite a basic tweak to the theme turned out to be much more major. Fingers crossed I have got everything working the way I intended it to.

First of all, you will notice that on the home page the daily links posts and Twitter posts are now separated from proper articles. Links and Twitter now sit in the “splash and dash” section in the grey box to the right.

After toying with the idea of going with a three column theme, I decided it was too claustrophobic and squashed-up looking. In the end, I decided it was better to do away with the sidebar. Looking at the site stats, it became apparent that the many links in the sidebar simply aren’t used very much at all. So I have removed it to make way for the new splash and dash section.

Apart from extensively testing it in Firefox 3, I have only had a quick look at how the site looks in three other browsers. Surprise surprise, it looks a bit weird in Internet Exploder. But if you see any other quirks please let me know. Just one note — I know I need to fix the comments section, and that will be the first thing I do once I get back under the hood.

I also need to update most of the pages, which now appear in a navigation bar just below the masthead. You will see that the archives, which used to reside on the sidebar, now have their own page. It’s not finished yet (most notably I have not put in the circuits yet), but will be in due course.

I am also trying to work out what to put in the grey box (which currently contains “about” and “latest comment”). I think a list of the latest comments would look good, and maybe one other thing. If you think of it as having four sections, each residing in one corner of the box, I am thinking of using one of them to promote my other projects. Any suggestions for what the other corner should contain would be most welcome.

Also, I think I remember our regular correspondent Ponzonha requesting that I add the facility to subscribe to comments by email. I haven’t forgotten this and I will definitely implement this before the start of the season.

Generally, I will be adding more stuff to the site in the near future. So this is the perfect opportunity to suggest anything you’d like to see. And any feedback on the new look would be much appreciated. Thanks!